Best Publisher EVER

In 1989, J.B. ("Jibé") Pontalis started the imprint "L'Un et l'autre" at the French publishing house Gallimard.

It's a conceit only the French could think profitable, but, for a translation junkie and adaptation fetishist, also a thrilling enterprise: a collection of books dedicated to stories told at an angle by narrators whose subjects are famous works or famous people and whose object is to climb inside these structures worn smooth by familiarity and see the world through them instead of in them. Each story, as with any act of mediation, is the story of the story and the story of its telling, the story of the triangle made between narrator and event and reader, a triangle of eyes trained on each other, devouring each other.

At newstands these days one finds a glut of celebrity profiles, one leg of the triangle. How refreshing to tilt the viewfinder for a moment to explore the experience of the viewer instead of the viewed. To live within the effects of art instead of trying to wriggle back into the intentions behind it.

This is what L'Un et l'autre has to say about itself, on the dustjacket of Monsieur Bovary:

"Life stories, but as invented by memory, remade by imagination, brought to life by passion. Subjective accounts, a thousand miles away from traditional biography.

Someone and an Other: the author and his secret subject, the painter and her model, linked by a powerful and intimate bond. Where is the line between portrait and self-portrait?

Someones and Others: those who burst onto center stage as well as those who only perform in the theater of our minds, people and places, forgotten faces, names effaced, silhouettes misplaced."

(translated by The Bunny)

http://www.gallimard.fr/collections/fiche_unautre.htm

In Which the Bunny Rants About Why Free-Market Capitalism is Not the Answer to Everything

Exchange at a weekly meeting of libertarians, as reported by The New Yorker:

At one point, Niederhoffer interrupted him and asked, “What are the general principles?” DiLorenzo replied, “Markets work and government-run monopolies don’t.”
[...]
Don’t you agree that the government does some things well? the man asked. “No,” DiLorenzo replied. “The government has screwed up the national parks. I think capitalism would do a much better job with land.”
--http://http//www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/15/071015fa_fact_cassidy?currentPage=9

Why are some people so in love with the free market? Whence this urge to privatize everything from kindergarten to camping trips? Is it because the free market has promised to make their skin better and their ass firmer and their soulmate...appear? Perhaps. But I think they love it like cold fusion: because it is beautiful and potentially very powerful, and, because no one's proven it actually works, seems like that great discovery anyone of us could be on the verge of making. Any day now.

The apparent beauty of the system is the abstraction of currency: a dollar is an empty marker of value, a door that opens onto a different scene each time it swings. Individuals and groups collaborate to define these abstract values by balancing expended effort against experienced wants and needs, creating a de facto democracy of desire. Nothing is innately valuable, nor is value imposed by a state or religious authority. Each individual is free to define things and phenomena and even other people as being valuable, and to turn the product of their work into as near a picture of their happiness as possible. The beautiful market is a creature that thinks for itself using all of our minds.

The hidden brutality of the system is the trajectory of currency, which, unlike water, tends to flow uphill, a scum of power trailing in its wake. Since the only way to vote is by spending money, in a truly free market the poor are completely disenfranchised, and everyone but the very wealthy can only be considered to be somewhat franchised. Speak of meritocracy all you want, but there are some things no one should have to earn, including such luxuries as having enough to eat, a place to sleep, clean clothes to wear, medical care, education, public transportation, clean water, fresh air, and access to information, and these are precisely the sorts of things that people who don't have a lot to begin with lose when privatization strikes. Apparently it is not only hands but entire people who may be invisible in the eyes of the market.

And so I wonder: are those who advocate this system so seduced by the cold gleam of its elegance they fail to see how sharp is its edge?

Or do they see and just not care?

A Day at the Beach

ropes of whip kelp
dug from the sea's damp flank
lash ankle to hip to wrist,
stalk to joint, catch
the errant limb in their knotted wrack.

which way
is the other way
which turn the unbinding turn
to turn loose
such an accidental coil?